PlusPortals Introduces Online Meetings in Groups, Quiz and Coursework Submission Reports, and More in Major Update Release

Aug 17, 2022 abiron

Rediker Software, a leader in school administrative software, has released a major update for PlusPortals, a family of web portals designed to streamline K-12 school communication and keep parents and students connected with the classroom. Since early 2020, the ability for schools to effectively engage and interact with parents and students online became a necessity, and schools had to evolve quickly. PlusPortals helped to meet this challenge, supporting online learning and remote classroom workflows. To enhance popular online engagement features, the latest PlusPortals update includes over 15 new improvements to the product, including online meetings in groups, coursework, and quiz submission reporting, and new filtering tools for calendar events. 

Improved Personalized Calendar

PlusPortals features customized, combined calendars that can include homework, tests, field trips, sports, and other events. School calendar events can now be targeted to individual grade levels. The calendar filtering controls have also been upgraded so multiple categories can be selected. These improvements will populate parent and student calendars with more relevant information and allow the user to view the categories of interest to them. 

Online Meetings in Groups

In PlusPortals, the groups feature connects teachers and staff with students and parents for extracurricular or academic groups. “I remember when I was a Database Coordinator for a public school district,” says Sue Van Wyck, Business Analyst at Rediker Software with over 18 years of experience working in a public school district. “I was very excited when groups became dynamic based on a demographic field. This enabled me to make separate groups for School Counselors, Special Ed Case Managers, and even for the Athletic Director. Each group can have completely different access based on their needs.” 

Group administrators can now add online meetings for the groups they are assigned to. They can either add a Microsoft Teams meeting or a custom link, allowing them to use any online meeting platform. “We introduced online meetings for the classroom teacher in 2020,” says Van Wyck. "This has since been a very popular feature for our schools, so we wanted to expand this functionality to groups.” 

Coursework Submission Reporting Tool 

Parents and students stay up to date with the portals’ class pages that can include homework, quizzes, announcements, links, and other documents. “In my day, students passed in their assignments directly to the teacher,” says Van Wyck. “Now assignments are turned in electronically from Google Drive, quizzes can be created online by the teacher on PlusPortals, and classrooms can participate in online discussion sessions.” 

The new submission reporting tool allows teachers to quickly determine which students have or have not turned in an assignment, submitted a quiz, or participated in a discussion. Teachers also have access to open an unsubmitted quiz for a student and submit it as is. 

Schools Can Measure Engagement 

Through PlusPortals, email can be sent to any group of recipients, filtered by user type, groups, grade level, students, and parents. School administrators can now access and analyze email statistics for specific emails. 

“As a school PlusPortals administrator, I was able to see overall email statistics and check for bounce backs and open rates,” says Van Wyck. “Occasionally, I was asked for statistics on a particular message because the administrators wanted to know if it was well-received. This new feature allows the portal administrator to access a specific email and see the response statistics by date.” 

Administrators can also choose to track and confirm that parents or students have opened important documents, such as report cards, that have been added to a student’s E-Portfolio.

About Rediker Software 

For more than 40 years, Rediker Software has been a leader in school administrative software for private, public, international, religious, and independent schools. The company's products include AdminPlus, a cloud-based SIS solution, TeacherPlus Gradebook, ParentPlus and StudentPlus Web Portals, AdmissionsPlus, and Teacher Evaluator.